The Green Ledger and the Furnace Fund

Matthew Eighteen

I did not sleep that night. Maxine, my wife of forty years, woke at two in the morning and found me sitting in the kitchen in my robe with the porch light on.

“You’re going to wear a groove in that table,” she said.

“I might be wrong,” I said.

“About what?”

“About Warren.” I told her what he had said. I told her the words he used and the spoon on the cup.

“You’re not wrong,” she said at last. “You’ve just not decided what you’re going to do about it.”

I had already half decided. I had spent the last hour of that night writing a letter in my head to the editor of the county paper.

I am ashamed to tell you how good that felt, lying in my mind like a loaded gun on a shelf.

Maxine read my face. “Vernon Haskell,” she said. “What does your Bible say?”

Matthew eighteen, verse fifteen. “Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.”

The order matters. The Lord did not say tell the paper. He did not say tell the sheriff. He said alone, then a few, then the church, and the whole point of it was that you meant to gain a brother, not win a fight.

“He may have a reason,” Maxine said.

“A reason for taking money out of a dead man’s furnace fund?”

“I didn’t say a good reason. I said a reason. Men like Warren don’t wake up one morning wanting to steal from a widow. Something’s happened to him.”

I went to bed at four. I decided to do it the Lord’s way, and I decided it with about as much grace as a mule going into a trailer.